Up to about 30 seconds of footage already

It’s About Time

It’s about time I upload this. Originally intended as an experiment to render decent looking clouds at very little cost, it ballooned into the most ambitious project since the snowy video I made back in high school. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to work on this for awhile. Partly because of time, partly because at the point where I stopped, the video had become exponentially more complex than I originally intended.

Has a working title of Freelancer Aces. It became a sort of combination of Freelancer and Ace Combat. Taking heavy cues from Ace Combat for the visual style of flying, and using the Freelancer assets in a setting they haven’t really been used before was great fun.

I’m still not sure if this will ever be finished. I certainly want to, but it would require much fore-thought and time to finish it in a satisfactory manner. As I said before, any future scenes of this would be exponentially more complex to animate than the simple fly by animations that consist of most of it. I hope someday to get around to finishing it. I really do like it.

Ship/Missile model credits go to Digital Anvil, the creators of Freelancer. Music is “Open the War” from the Ace Combat 5 soundtrack. All footage animated and rendered in Lightwave 3D. Composited in Adobe Premier.

Snowball effect

As per usual with these sort of things, it started out as a simple render which turned into a simple animation and then turned into a short animation. Things are chugging along, and I now have about 26 seconds of footage, and music to put it all together with. It’s going to take a while for sure, as I’m going to have to do things that I really don’t have an effective way of doing. However the same could have been said about the clouds featured in the video. Not to mention the sheer length of the final video just means there is a whole lot of work that needs to get done. 

I had wanted to do something planetside because it would be fun to have more stuff around the models. The trouble wasn’t so much the terrain. The hardest part of terrain is finding a suitable source image. The real trouble is with the clouds. After some thought I figured out an efficient system of generating clouds. It’s very light on the render engine. Most frames won’t take longer than 15 seconds to render, and looks well enough for my purposes. I’ll keep updates on what’s going on with the video. For the time being, here are a couple stills from it. 

I ship Ace Combat/Everything

A great many things I do tend to be inspired by Ace Combat, and this is no different. I was watching the Ace Combat Zero intro movie and decided to do a sort of melding of the two universes. 

First thing first, I needed missiles. I imported all the missiles from Freelancer into Lightwave. It’s actually pretty interesting to note that although Freelancer only uses one missile model and one torpedo model, each house actually has its own variant of missile, torpedo, and launcher. However even if they were ingame, you would never be able to tell, as the missiles had to be small enough to fit into their appropriate launchers. I actually did not even realise that missiles had a physical model at all until I resized them during the development of Itano Circus. 

The missiles pictured above are modified and resized versions of the vanilla Freelancer missiles. The fuel tank looking thing to the left and right of center are new. I don’t have any immediate use for these armaments as I am only using two of them at the moment, but it’s good to have. 

The Defender model itself has also been slightly modified to add hardpoints so that the missiles can specifically attach to something on the hull rather than just float there like I tend to usually do. 

Update 1: The Dagger is going to be the bad guy. Ingame, the Dagger is a light fighter, so its armament is a little lighter. I imagine it would a short range rapid response fighter similar to the MiG-29, so I’ve given it an external fuel tank.